Program Topics

Advances in fermentation and cell culture understanding through new technologies

Fermentation and cell culture are widely used in chemical, food, and pharmaceutical industries. Optimization of productivity and product quality requires a better understanding of the culture such as cell physiology and media composition. This session will highlight recent advances in fermentation and cell culture process development through various new technologies for production of chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the opportunities and the challenges.

Conveners

As pressure increases on fermentation-based processes to deliver lower costs, faster development cycles, and more science and risk-based development, there is a need for more advanced process analytical tools. These new tools for process measurement, control, monitoring, and data analysis enable improved process characterization and understanding that can be leveraged for improved biotech and biopharma process development and performance. Advances exist in areas as close to the process as new types of process measurement and on-line analytical techniques all the way to modelling and control of the process. In biopharma, these new technologies can be leveraged as process analytical technology (PAT), which holds the promise of providing a new framework for innovative pharmaceutical manufacturing

Conveners

Fre Tachea – LBNLChris McDowell – Novozymes

Industrial Collaborations: Round Table

Today, internal and external industrial collaborations are commonplace and critical to deliver projects and increase expertise. Extra layers of complexity and paperwork often come with External Collaborations leading to delays and often frustration before the rewards. This session will be an interactive roundtable where lessons learned and best practices for external collaborations will be explored. Case studies will be presented of collaborations (industrial and academic) that went well and those that had challenges along the way. Partner identification, intellectual property, the contract process, and ensuring short term and long term stakeholder engagement will all be discussed during the session. The goal is to have positive experiences at every step of the process from idea to delivery.

Conveners

Bench to Manufacturing Suite: Scale-up, Tech Transfer, Post Transfer

Commercialization of fermentation processes often involves scaling from milliliters to thousands of liters and many parameters important to fermentation do not scale in a straight-forward manner. This of course makes fermentation scale-up both challenging and rewarding when solved. Some of those challenges include differences in oxygen transfer, mixing, shear, raw materials, measurement systems, heterogeneity, and equipment capability. This session will give scientists and engineers a chance to share their research, experiences, and insights into delivering a process to the marketplace and sustaining that process after commercialization.

Conveners

Advances in Microbial Expression

Efficient microbial expression of recombinant proteins, as biopharmaceutical products, as industrial enzymes or as efficient biocatalysts for the synthesis of value-added chemicals & fuels, remains the focus of R&D efforts in both industry & academia. These efforts span from improving expression in existing microbial workhorses such as E. coli and S. cerevisiae to developing new hosts expression systems using novel organisms. While advances in the fields of metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, bioinformatics, genome scale modeling and systems biology have helped develop cutting edge tools for optimization of expression hosts at the strain level, advances in our understanding of fermentation technology and resulting innovations in equipment and process development strategies have played an equally critical role in unlocking the complete potential of these engineered hosts. This session aims at showcasing some of the recent advances in the development of microbial expression systems and processes, with an emphasis on innovative approaches to combining strain and process level solutions to achieve optimized expression and productivity.